I’ve caught wind of two wonderful responses to my recent post on Charli xcx’s new album Brat and the subterranean melancholy that lurks beneath the defiant hedonism of a 2024 brat summer. Here is the first of two reflections on these interjections:
Byrosaurus Rex drags underscores into the fray, as an example of pop brattishness that retains the bite of class ressentiment. They compare each artist’s development, from underscores’ chimeric and nomadic genre-strafing on 2018 Skin Purifying Treatment EP to the (relatively) more straight-forward pop of 2023’s Wallsocket release, alongside Brat and Charli’s more eclectic output prior to Brat‘s singular soundscape.
I am thinking a lot about this process of becoming more recognisably pop (with a nonetheless clear contemporaneity) as a kind of ‘minor’ cute-ification at the moment: a streamlining of genre aberrations into recognisable pop motifs that nonetheless challenges what is so often expressed by pop as a ‘major’ genre. As Deleuze and Guattari write of the minoritarian in Kafka, we might look at these trajectories not as a selling-out to a more heavily codified and capitalist aesthetics and instead as an attempt to ask “how to tear a minor [pop] away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path?” Deterritorialization is at hand; reterritorialization is the enemy.
In the context of contemporary pop, there is a “going overground” here, perhaps more evident with underscores, which further highlights the faults in Charli xcx’s wistful longing for a time pre-fame. But one does not cancel out the other; these two forms of melancholy and resentment meet in the middle of our contemporary pop moment. This makes the paradoxes on display in this in-between all the more intriguing, and these paradoxes do not necessitate one side of the pop divide being pitted against the other. They come together in a growing assemblage of twenty-first-century affects, revealing the terse and unfulfilled desires that linger on in all of us.
I am again reminded of Mark Fisher, writing about The Jam’s 1980 hit “Going Underground”, with its lyrics expressing a sense of contentedness, the pleasures of a ‘minor’ life, and the disparagement of fame and money, all through the medium of a ubiquitous pop song:
You want more money, of course I don’t mind
To buy nuclear textbooks for atomic crimes
And the public gets what the public wants
But I want nothing this society’s gotI’m going underground (going underground)
Well, if the brass bands play and feet start to pound
Going underground (going underground)
Well, let the boys all sing and let the boys all shout for tomorrow
Mark writes of post-punk’s stratospheric rise through mod culture in general, noting the power of the paradox felt in a song about the underground reaching overground ubiquity. But he argues this was the function of The Jam as a whole, their popular-modernist gambit:
The Jam, like The Who before them, drew their power from an auto-destructive paradox: they were fuelled by a frustration, a tension, a blocked energy, a jam. Discharging this tension in catharsis would destroy the very libidinal blockages on which the music depended – and this self-cancelling logic of desire reached its necessary conclusion in The Who’s smashing of their instruments.
The Jam’s modes of expression differ, of course, from those of Charli and underscores, but the sense of blocked energy is familiar, and even more palpable with the latter. Mark continues:
What made this music culture so positive was its capacity to express negativity – a negativity that was thereby de-privatised as well as de-naturalised. In the lack of such outlets, negative affect now is internalised, or else it bleeds into the ostensibly hedonic, generating a suppressed sadness that lurks behind a mandatory enjoyment.
Perhaps, with this in mind, Fisher would have little interest in the mandatory enjoyment of Charli xcx’s brattishness, as its viral marketing campaign — which hardly feels coordinated by her record label, as the album cover spawns a million meme variants, but you can never tell these days — presents the album as a pure slab of hedonic enjoyment devoid of haters. Indeed, the album’s universal acclaim is oddly jarring. The album is great, but the enthusiasm still lacks criticality and crowds out the conflicting affects expressed by the album itself, as discussed last time.
But there is leakage. Whereas the album itself feels like an expression of entrapment in the conflicts of modern celebrity, the virality of its album cover has far exceeded this context. The UK’s Green Party, for instance, riffed on the cover to promote its standing in the forthcoming UK general election…
… and what is this if not a party-hauntology of another sort, a more political-party hauntology through which the Greens channel the dejection of the summer of 2024 into their own offer of an alternative to Tory-Labour stagnancy. Charli xcx herself thus vicariously offers up an opportunity to express feelings of discontent that are seemingly so distant from those on Brat itself. It is heartening to see these opportunities being seized by others. And they are opportunities!
As Mark continues:
Paradox is also opportunity – someone, I don’t recall who, said that paradoxes are emissaries from another world where things work differently. If popular modernism’s attempts to resolve the paradox of political commitment and consumer pleasure now seem hopelessly naive, that’s more a testament to the disavowed depressive conditions of our current moment than a dispassionate assessment of the possibilities. In our world, so it would seem, popular culture’s embrace of consumerism leads ineluctably to the decomposition of class consciousness and the arrival of capitalist realism. In another world – the world that Stuart Hall tried to theorise, and to instigate – consumer desire and class consciousness could not only be reconciled, but would actually require one another. The political significance of working class creativity in popular music was that it gave us vivid glimpses and tastes of this other world, a world that, via these anticipations and rehearsals, at least intersected with ours, or became ours, intermittently yet insistently.
Charli xcx attempts to bring these two things together, but the results may still be (affectively speaking at least) unconvincing. No one would ever deign to call Charli xcx a “working-class hero”, and her melancholy remains the “party hauntology” of the superstar. But the paradox of a rich pop princess still striving for some sort of class consciousness on the other side of consumer desire — even if it is amongst her similarly alienated superstar peers, as with Lorde on the remix of Girl, so confusing — brings to light another world that may be so much further from our own, but is sought after by a whole generation of female pop artists who feel the pressures of objectivization and privatisation otherwise avoided by their more visibly queer and sonically transgressive friends (we can think of SOPHIE here again).
I think Byrosaurus draws this out nicely, exploring how Brat is as “confrontational as Charli xcx described it to be but I think underscores more explicitly exerts a confrontational catharsis of social dynamics implicated by capitalist hierarchy and power.” An artist like underscores more keenly stays with the trouble, and this is useful, as its a trouble that Brat is hardly inoculated against. The two can be pulled together to exacerbate the opportunities that each offers.